Every Thursday, Bob took groceries to an old woman named Mrs. Hasselbeck, and so two days after finding out about Helen—and about Jim’s not wanting him to know that she was dying—Bob walked up the steps to Mrs. Hasselbeck’s house and rang the bell, carrying one grocery bag that contained cat food and peanut butter and apples and bread and orange juice and instant coffee and a pint of gin and a few other things. The gin he brought her only every other week; it worried him, but then he had figured out to water it down so that it was only half a pint of gin she was getting every two weeks, and she did not seem to notice.
During the height of the pandemic he would leave the food on the front steps, but these days he went in—wearing a mask to protect her—and now she stood there hunched over and smiling up at him, her knobby hand holding tight to the top of a chair. There was something oddly elegant about her, in spite of the utter chaos of her small house. She had huge brown eyes in her old face, and high cheekbones. She was so tiny that Bob could have picked her up in one arm, and she said, “You do know, Robert, that Thursdays are my favorite day of the week.” She said this every time he went there. And now he said, “Well, they’re a pretty great day for me too.” He did not mean this, of course. Her house smelled so strongly of cat piss that he could inhale it through his mask, and there were always dirty dishes on the small kitchen table—everywhere, it seemed—and the place was small and dark—
But today her eyes shone vibrantly as she looked up at him and said, “Robert, the most wonderful thing just happened.”
He took the groceries from the bag, setting them on a counter cluttered with used tea bags and cups and dirty silverware, and he turned to her and said, “And what was that?”
She moved toward him, her small arms maneuvering from chair top to chair top. “Robert. Two women met on the sidewalk out in front of my house this morning.” She pointed toward the window. “And I watched them for maybe thirty minutes or more, and they talked and talked and talked, and I had the sense that they didn’t know each other that well, but there they were, talking and talking, and I finally went outside and I said, ‘You two women have no idea how happy you’ve made me. Just to watch you.’ ” She hesitated and then said, “And they were very nice.”
“Hey, that’s great,” Bob said.
“Can you stay a few minutes?” she asked, and so Bob sat down in a chair and he stayed for an hour. Across from him was the clock on the wall, and he thought that time had not moved so slowly since geometry class in high school.
She said what she usually said: She missed her husband terribly (he had been dead for twelve years), and her five boys had all moved away. “Away,” she said, with bewilderment on her face. But then she told him something new. She said, “Do you know, Robert, at one point I had all five boys in high school? Five.” And then with the most innocent face he had ever seen (he thought), she said, “And they all hated me, and I didn’t know why. I still don’t know why.”
Silence sat in the room with them.
Then Bob said, “Hey, they were adolescents. Adolescents always hate their parents. I wouldn’t take it personally if I were you.”
She watched him from where she had seated herself on the couch, whose cushions were flattened enough to look as though they had been beaten for years by a broom. Then she said, “Did you hate your mother when you were in high school?”
Bob had never hated his mother.
He said, “Well, I probably wasn’t very nice to her. Maybe she thought I hated her.” This was not true. He did not say: When you have killed your father, you are always good to your mother.
He moved as though to stand up, and she said, “Robert, I have one favor to ask you.”
“Ah, sure,” he said.
She went into the bathroom and then found a magic marker in a drawer in the kitchen, and then she moved toward him and handed him what he thought at first was a small pile of rags. But they were her underpants. “Do you mind writing on the back of these a big B so when I put them on I know which is the back and which is the front?”
So he took them, there were four pair—a tremendously off-white color—of roundish underpants, and he finally found the labels, so worn they were hardly there, on the back, and he took the magic marker and wrote a large B on each pair near the top. “There you go.” He handed them up to her where she stood over him, watching.
“Thank you, Robert,” she said. “I appreciate that. The pair I’m wearing now you can do next week.”
And he said, “Sure, no problem.”
When he left, he told her to be careful with the gin, as he always did, and she said, Yes, she would be, and she thanked him again.
As he got into his car, he felt a weight so heavy inside he had to sit for a moment behind the wheel, and then he drove away.
8
Olive Kitteridge had been thinking about all the unrecorded lives around her. Lucy Barton had used that phrase when she first met Olive and heard Olive’s story about her mother: unrecorded lives, she had said. And Olive thought about this. Everywhere in the world people led their lives unrecorded, and this struck her now. She summoned Lucy Barton again.
“Come in!” Olive Kitteridge yelled when she heard the knock on the door, and the door opened and Lucy walked in. “Hello, Olive,” she said. She was more relaxed than the first time she had been there, months ago now, Olive could see that. Lucy took her coat off and tossed it onto the small couch, then sat down next to it. “How have you been?”
Olive flapped a hand. “Who cares. Now, as I told you on the phone, I have another story to tell you.” Olive swung her foot and leaned back in her chair.
“Go, go. I’m ready,” Lucy said. She sat forward, her hands folded on her lap.
Olive nodded. “Okay. There was a woman in town here named Janice Tucker. I don’t suppose you ever heard of her—” Lucy shook her head. “Well, why would you. She died a few years ago, before you came to town. Janice used to cut hair. She cut my hair, she had a nice little business, and she did this from her home. There was a place between the kitchen and the garage, and that was her little hair-cutting place. And she had parakeets.”
“Parakeets,” Lucy repeated.
“That’s right. Two cages with two parakeets each in them, and she really liked those parakeets.”
“Was she married?” Lucy asked, sitting back, adjusting herself on the stiff couch.
“Yes, she was. But hold that thought. No kids, by the way. And so, one day—oh, this was years ago now—”
“How many years ago?” Lucy asked.
Olive thought about this. “Maybe ten? I still had my car, but I also had my cane. So I went to get my hair cut one day and there was a woman sitting there having her hair cut, and she looked—oh, you know—like a snot-wot, a bit younger than Janice, so maybe forty-five years old.”
Lucy rearranged herself, crossing her legs.
“You could tell this snot-wot had once been pretty and still thought of herself that way, though she’d gained weight, is what I thought, and her face was very hard. Now, Janice was pretty in a different way, a plainer way, but Janice was attractive, always had been, I think. So anyway, snot-wot woman started to go a little crazy.”
“What do you mean?” Lucy asked, and Olive nodded and said, “I mean, when Janice put her under the dryer the woman started to muss up her hair and said, Not like this, I didn’t want to look like this, and she was really quite worked up and you could see it unsettled Janice. Of course it would.”
“But what did she want to look like?” Lucy asked.
“Who knows. She was a nut. So she got up with her hair still half wet and she said, ‘I want to pay right now,’ and Janice took her credit card and in a few moments Nutty Woman left.
“And then”—Olive pointed a finger toward the air—“Janice looked at me, white as a ghost, and she said, ‘Olive, oh my God, I think I know who that woman was.’ ”
—
